Salem St hill, in the neighborhood where I grew up is really steep, so if you pedal as fast as your legs can take you through the intersection with Braintree, you hit the top of the hill with a head of steam, and it feels like you’re flying. I’m seven or eight years old, cycling around my neighborhood with three or four other kids my age. My bike is red, and I blow right through the stop sign without looking, and I don’t see the oncoming car on Braintree. The driver slams the brakes in time, and I fall over. I’m lying on my left side on my bike, completely under the front bumper of the car. Luckily it’s the seventies so cars have a front hood compartment large enough to land aircraft, and a huge distance from the front bumper to the wheels. I can literally still see the tread from that tire in my memory. As I’m laying there with my adrenaline pounding, under the shade of the Chevy Behemoth or Chrysler Land-Yacht, thinking about what a close call I’ve just had.  The face of the driver of the car appears sideways underneath the grill and, realizing she hasn’t killed me, yells “Kevin Glynn!” (she knows my name?). This enraged she-demon (can you imagine how freaked out she must have been)  drags me from under the car and pulls me bodily down the street by the arm to my house (she knows where I live!?!)

She tells my mother exactly what happened. I have no recollection of the content of that conversation, because of the cocktail of adrenaline and dread, or how much trouble I was in afterwards, because I was gobsmacked at the rollercoaster of luck I’m having. I’ve narrowly avoided death and disability at the hands of my brother’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Sheehan, who lives 2 streets over.

In elementary school, the last day of the school year was the day you found out who your next grade teacher would be, and you marched down to their classroom to meet them, and be told how wonderful next year will be, before going back to your own classroom for cookies and early release home. On the last day of second grade, 1978, I walked down the hall and into the classroom of Mrs. Sheehan, immediately recognizing the woman who had almost ran over me with the car and then yelled at me, and then had the gall to get me in trouble with my mother!  That’s the only summer in my life I dreaded going back to school.